I was recently in Barcelona with dozens of the top personal fitness trainers in the world. I was part of a team introducing a cutting edge technology for use in gyms and in the home. These were some of the best educated and motivated professionals I have ever worked with.

At an event like this, and in such company, there is always great networking and sharing of ideas. It’s always fascinating to learn from your peers and inevitably there are sometimes differences of opinion. On the last evening, the owner of the sponsoring company took all the elite and master trainers out for a meal at one of the top restaurants in the city. Now this particular restaurant is internationally acclaimed for its meat dishes. I said “Gary, you do know that I’m vegan, don’t you?” “That’s fine”, said Gary, “I’ve arranged for them to get some lettuce leaves in for you specially”.

Comments like that are water off a duck’s back to me, as I know I can get a tasty, nourishing and nutritional meal from any good kitchen. I’m also accustomed to physical fitness experts being ignorant of the facts surrounding a vegan or even raw, diet.

But I thought, “You know what, I WILL try some meat today and see how it goes”. We all have stupid ideas, and that was one of my worst for a while. My digestive system has become so accustomed to processing my food with minimum effort that it only needed a few mouthfuls of hard-to-digest steak to protest violently. I left the rest of the steak and asked for some extra vegetables (which the chef was more than happy to provide).

Now I don’t normally get through even one day with a group of people without them knowing my views on diet, but we’d been concentrating so hard on pure physical fitness for the best part of a week that I’d missed out on ‘educating’ a few of the other guys .

“Come off it, Skip” one of them said. ” how can you have a body and physique like that and you don’t even get any protein from meat?”

Well I don’t have a real problem with anyone eating meat – in spite of everything I know about how most animals are kept and what they’re fed and treated with through their lives. We’re all entitled to make our own decisions. But we ought to at least have the right information to make our decisions.

We were in Barcelona, one of the homes of bull-fighting, so I asked him what the animal he was eating had been fed on? He had to admit that fighting bulls did pretty well in the muscle department without eating meat! I explained about the body’s ability to create its own protein and the amount of protein in fruit, vegetables, seeds and nuts which contain all the protein we need. Most people are slowly killing themselves because they are overloading on too much protein. We’d already talked about the ‘Alkalising Raw Protein’ supplement I take. I’m fairly sure he still thinks I’m a freak of nature because most of the vegetarians he’s met before didn’t look particularly healthy.

But at least there’s one more physical trainer out there who knows that it’s not necessary to have meat in your diet in order to be healthy, vital and full of energy with a good physique.